The return of Cap Court, with a twist: Which NHL stars have great contracts?

We’re into late July, and with apologies to Vladimir Tarasenko and Matt Dumba, the free agent frenzy is pretty much done. And this year, I think we can all agree that it was… fine? That’s about it, right? There weren’t many big names available, and the flat cap meant that there weren’t as many big deals flying around as we’re used to seeing.

That’s probably good news for the 32 teams, who tend to make the worst mistakes when the UFA market opens. Looking back at this year’s deals, there were certainly a few overpays, but nothing that seems outrageous. Maybe GMs are finally learning. Or maybe the flat cap meant they just didn’t have enough to spend, and will be right back to setting piles of money on fire next summer.

Either way, this sudden burst of thriftiness feels like something worth recognizing. So this week, I’m breaking out an old gimmick with the return of Cap Court. That’s the feature where we pick five contracts and put them on trial, judging the deals based only on the years that are left and the cap hit they carry. We’ve done five of these over the years, meaning 25 verdicts have been handed down, and it’s fair to say that every reader agreed with 100% of them.

But this time, there’s a twist: We’re not looking for bad contracts. This time, we’re looking for great ones.

As always, we’re viewing this from a team’s perspective, meaning we want to know which contracts are “great” the way Nathan MacKinnon’s was for the Avalanche for all those years. MacKinnon himself might disagree with the idea that that was an especially great contract, since it ultimately cost him tens of millions of dollars. Or maybe not, and he’d tell you that he was happy to leave some cap room for his team to build a winner around him. Players always say that when their contract is tossed into the “great” pile. Some of them might even mean it.

I’ve picked five contracts that I think you could argue are great ones from a team perspective, but could also fall into the range of merely good. That doesn’t mean that I think these are the only five deals on the league that could qualify, and in fact I’ve left some off the list that are pretty obviously huge bargains. Leon Draisaitl, Cale Makar, Brad Marchand and Jason Robertson are all underpaid, relative to what they bring to the table. So is Connor McDavid, even though he carries the second highest cap hit in the league. Jack Hughes might be one more big season away from becoming the new MacKinnon as far bargains go. I’m not sure anyone would argue any of those, which means we don’t need to waste time putting them on the docket.

The five names I’ve chosen should be at least a little tougher. So court is now in session: Are these good contracts, are do any of them rise to the level of being great ones?

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The story behind the best player to play exactly one game for your favorite team (Western edition)

This week’s dog days of summer project is to try to find the best player who played exactly one game for every NHL team. Yesterday we covered the Eastern Conference, coming up with a list that included a 300-game winner, a celebrity divorcee, a member of the legendary 1972 Team Canada squad, and a pro wrestling legend’s dad. It was an eclectic group, is what I’m saying, and today should be more of the same. Let’s head west and seek out the best one-and-done players in each team’s history.

Anaheim Ducks

The Ducks have got some fun names on their list. Remember Trevor Gillies, the mustachioed Islanders enforcer who went wild against the Penguins in 2011? He played one game for the Ducks back in 2005, racking up 21 PIM in 2:40 of ice time. The Ducks’ one-game club can also claim recent Sabres’ signing Dustin Tokarski, as well as the record-holder for the longest Stanley Cup suspension in Aaron Rome.

We’ll give the nod to journeyman blueliner Ian Moran, who endured “Get a Brain” jokes long enough to have an 11-season career, almost all of it split between the Penguins and Bruins. (Fun fact: The Pens traded him to Boston for the draft pick that they turned into Paul Bissonnette.) He signed with the Ducks in 2006, dressed for one game, and spent the rest of the next two seasons in Europe and the AHL before retiring.

Arizona Coyotes

The Coyotes would absolutely dominate the "stars who were acquired but played zero games" list, but they don’t give us much to work with as far as one-gamers. That said, we can at least turn to a guy who was once traded one-for-one for an MVP. That would be David Aebischer, the Swiss goalie who won a Cup as a rookie with the 2001 Avalanche, played in two Olympics, and was traded to Montreal for Jose Theodore in 2006. He signed with the Coyotes the year after, and started their third game of the 2007-08 season. One loss to the Blue Jackets later, he was waived and demoted, and headed back to Europe.

Calgary Flames

First things first: Shoutout to Jarrod Skalde, who qualifies for this exercise for three different teams thanks to one-game stints with Calgary, Dallas and Philadelphia. We’ll be nice to Flames fans and not go with Morgan Klimchuk, the first-round pick from the Jarome Iginla deal that didn’t quite pay off. And while Gerry O'Flaherty was a solid 70s scorer, his one Flames game came for Atlanta, so we’ll look elsewhere.

That probably leaves us with Mark Lamb, Calgary’s fourth-round pick in 1982 who made his debut midway through the 1985-86 season before heading back down to the minors. The Flames would let him walk as a free agent that summer, and he’d go on to bounce around the league for another decade, most memorably in a five-year stint with the Oilers, where he’d win a Cup in 1990. Later, he’d get Selke votes while captaining the expansion Senators before ending his career with the Flyers and Habs.

Chicago Blackhawks

On the goalie side, the Hawks could give us the very start of Carter Hutton’s career and (presumably) the very end of Anton Khudobin’s. For skaters, we could use old-school veterans like Rick Lanz if we need a defenseman, or Jeff Jackson if we need a soundbite. But instead, I’m going to draw on the full power of an Original Six team to go way back to the earliest days of the NHL itself. Our Hawks picks is a Hall-of-Famer named Barney Stanley, who made his name in other pro leagues but got into a single NHL game with the Hawks.

Maybe my favorite part of the story is the identity of the coach who put him in the lineup: Barney Stanley, who apparently looked at this underperforming team and figured that if you needed something done right then you had to do it yourself.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The story behind the best player to play exactly one game for your favorite team (Eastern edition)

Your favorite team has had some players who stuck around forever. They’re probably stars, but not necessarily. They’re just the guys who never left, or maybe did and kept coming back. You check the team record books for games played, and there they are, right near the top. And every single fan from that era has a memory of watching them do their thing.

And then, there are the guys at the other end of that games played list. The guys who played exactly one game for your team, and that’s it.

I’ve always been kind of fascinated by these guys. There are lots of players who only got into one NHL game, period – Sportsnet’s Ken Reid wrote a very fun book about them. But what about the guys who had longer NHL careers, enough to at least make a name for themselves, but still managed a one-game stop with a team along the way? When you think about, it’s not easy to do. And when it happens, there’s often a story behind it.

So this week, we’re going to look at all 32 NHL teams and ask a simple question: Who’s the best player to ever play one (and only one) game for them? We’re obviously getting a little bit subjective with “best” here – spoiler alert, there aren’t going to be a lot of Hall-of-Famers on the list – but we’ll try to at least find some names you know. I’m hoping you’ll learn a few things. And along the way, we’ll get to remember some guys, which is pretty much the best thing a hockey fan can do in mid-July.

We’ll start with the Eastern conference, before moving west tomorrow.

Boston Bruins

In theory, the Original Six teams should give us lots to work with. That doesn’t really turn out to be the case in Boston, although they do offer up a young Aaron Downey and the lost Pronovost brother. There’s not much question about who their most famous one-gamer would be, although that guy didn’t really make an NHL name for himself until he tried his hand at coaching and broadcasting.

So instead, let’s go with Ted Irvine, a winger who put together a long career in the 1960s and 70s. He was Bruins’ property in the Original Six days, but only cracked the lineup for a single game at the age of 19. (The fact that he went -2 in a game his team won 6-3 might give us a hint as to why it was his only game.) Like a lot of the era’s fringe players, he got his break when expansion arrived; he was claimed by the Kings, then had his best years as a Ranger before finishing off with the Blues. In all, he played over 700 games, scoring over 150 goals. And yes, despite all that, today he’s probably best known for his bratty kid.

Buffalo Sabres

This one’s a relatively easy call for now, although Joel Armia is making a run at the title. For now, he’ll have to take a back seat to one of the most prolific offensive defensemen of all-time, one who scored over 200 goals and nearly 700 points while earning all-star votes in eight straight seasons and topping the 20-goal mark six times. That would be Reed Larson, who’s scoring exploits have been somewhat forgotten in the decades since, but who was a steady scoring threat for the Red Wings from 1976 to 1986. He went on to play for the Bruins, Oilers, Islanders and North Stars before landing in Buffalo as a late-season UFA addition in 1990. He played one game for the Sabres, the last of his NHL, before retiring and being a first-ballot inductee into the Hall of Very Good.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Grab Bag: What the NHL GMs are up to, a possible celebrity sighting and more

In the Friday Grab Bag
- What various NHL GMs are up to these days
- We're using the word "clinch" wrong
- Comedy stars
- An obscure player who'll help you with Immaculate Gord
- And I'm pretty sure I found a three-year old future celebrity in a Macarena-themed HNIC intro

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Every GM class of the cap era, ranked from worst to best

It’s the middle of July, and we’re getting dangerously close to that time of year when the NHL essentially shuts down. Not officially, of course, but there’s about a six-week stretch where we don’t get much in the way of big signings or trades. It’s almost like the GMs all go on vacation.

Great, that makes this a perfect time to rank them.

Specifically, we’re going to rank each of the GM classes of the cap era. That means we’re going back to 2005 and judging each calendar year based on which full-time GMs were hired (with a glove tap to our friends at NHL Trade Tracker).

The ground rules are simple. We’re judging based only on what a GM did with that team, not anywhere else before or after. Interim GMs don’t count. And each hire in a given year gets equal weighting – if a year saw five guys hired and one of them was a modern-day Sam Pollock, that will boost the ranking but only to a point; the other guys matter just as much.

Each class gets ranked based on their impact, their success, and their entertainment value, based on a strict system of me pulling a number out of the air and running with it. Highest total wins.

We’ve got 19 years to work with, and we’re ranking all of them. Well, almost all of them, because…

Not ranked: Class of 2023

GMs: Barry Trotz (NSH), Kyle Dubas (PIT), Brad Treliving (TOR), Craig Conroy (CGY), Danny Briere (PHI)

Look, I think I've shown over the years that I’m willing to be entirely unreasonable when it comes to a ranking, but even I have my limits. These guys have been on the job for a few weeks, most of them have barely done anything newsworthy yet, and I'm not even sure Conroy knows that free agency has started. I can’t sit here and pretend that I can pass judgement on any of them yet. (But check back in August, when my 6,500-word Dubas vs. Treliving scorecard should be ready to go.)

#18. Class of 2017

GMs: Rob Blake (LAK), Jason Botterill (BUF), Dale Tallon (FLA)

I like the work Blake has done in L.A., even though he hasn’t won anything yet. The good news is that he’s easily the best GM of the class of 2017. The bad news is that it would be just about impossible not to be, since Botterill didn’t really work out in Buffalo and Tallon 2.0 in Florida was so busy vanquishing the Computer Boys that he ended up doing more for the Golden Knights than the Panthers.

Impact: 3/10

Success: 2/10

Entertainment: 2/10

Total: 7/30

#17. Class of 2022

GMs: Chris MacFarland (COL), Mike Grier (SJS), Pat Verbeek (ANA), Kent Hughes (MTL), Patrick Allvin (VAN)

It’s far too early to rank last year’s class with any degree of fairness, but life’s not fair so here we are. Only one year in, this group isn’t exactly crushing it; aside from MacFarlard, who took over a Cup champion, it’s been a whole lot of wheel-spinning for this group. Hughes at least gave us a great draft moment in Montreal, and Grier might be about to drop an Erik Karlsson blockbuster. But for now, it’s been a lot of talk and not much action – which is probably about right when three of the five teams are rebuilding, and one of them probably should be. Let's call this class a work in progress and slot them in here for now.

Impact: 2/10

Success: 2/10

Entertainment: 4/10

Total: 8/30

#16. Class of 2009

GMs: Stan Bowman (CHI), Greg Sherman (COL), Joe Nieuwendyk (DAL), Chuck Fletcher (MIN), Randy Sexton (FLA)

First things first: I cover the NHL for a living and I have zero recollection of Randy Sexton returning to the league to be the Panthers GM for less than a year. I do remember Nieuwendyk’s unsuccessful stint in Dallas, and poor Sherman being GM in title only while Patrick Roy and Joe Sakic did his job for him. Bowman won three Cups in Chicago with Dale Tallon’s roster, but ultimately left in disgrace. And that leaves us with Chuck Fletcher, who lasted almost a decade in Minnesota and was responsible for some of the most thrilling moments in franchise history like, uh…

Impact: 3/10

Success: 5/10, basically all from Bowman

Entertainment: 2/10

Total: 10/30

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)